Composting Down: SOLVE FOR X: ESSAYS, by Arthur Saltzman (Part 4 of 5)

I would actually add “language” above “books” on my nonbinding list of things that Dr. Saltzman valued, which, in case you’re not keeping score at home, makes “language” number one with a bullet. This love of language, this adoration of individual words, is both what drives his essays and what gets in their way.

When I started reading Solve for X, I kept a list of all of the words I was going to have to look up, but the list didn’t take. There were simply too many of them. “Noumenal,” “cruet,” “bathysphere,” “pasha,” “orrery,” “colophon,” “lagniappe,” to name but a few. Reading with a dictionary in your lap might work for office hours, but it’s hardly convenient on the A train. (Insert note here that the Kindle has a built-in dictionary.) That said, I was ready for the love affair with language, expected it even. After all, this was the man who spent five solid minutes rhapsodizing over the elegance of the word “latitude,” and I still remember him lingering over “fetishistic” for so long that I thought, Sheesh, just get a room already.

So, too, was I ready for the similes and metaphors that are so painstakingly labored that they overwhelm the rest of any given page: “with apologies to the battery of high school math teachers who passed me hurriedly up the line like a leaky bucket” or “One enters [a hotel bed] like an incision, sliding into sleep like a letter into its envelope or an afterthought between parentheses” or, appropriately enough, “Surfing a long sentence can be a heady, splendid ride, but in these cases [i.e., some carefully selected sentences by Henry James] the enterprise is doomed. Either it will dash itself against a period like a boulder or tear its hull against elliptical shoals.” Remember, I minored in the man. I saw this kind of shit coming.

"Orrery."

What I didn’t anticipate was his ever-deepening interest in disciplines that were not his own. When he branched out 20 years ago (give or take) he did so in the areas that I hinted at before: sports, popular culture. He would talk about ordering a record from a television commercial that promised all of the hits by “the original artists” and then tell us that when he eventually received the album the cover band interpreting the songs was called—wait for it—the Original Artists. (Ba-dum-pa!) That kind of thing. In Solve for X, however, his tangential targets are weightier, their language—and this is key—more specialized.

Joy and Jeremy birdwatch—remember her poem from The Paris Review—and Dr. Saltzman took great pleasure, not so much in getting out there with his binoculars and his mud boots, but, rather, in studying his Peterson’s before he even left the house: “Out of love, I am learning the topography of birds,” he writes. “I am practicing the positions of their superciliaries, their scapulars, and their secondaries.” He’s boning up out of love, all right, and I don’t doubt his love for Joy, but so too does he commit himself out of love for such words as “superciliaries,” “scapulars,” and “secondaries.” Later, he references a vocabulary card full of architectural terms, as far as I can tell, just so he drop “ornate astragals,” “volutes,” “abaci,” “fillets,” and “helices.”

It is almost as if he so mastered the vocabulary of his own discipline that he had to investigate others in order to satisfy his desire for words, words, and more words. The vampire who runs out of victims at home has to move a town over. The net effect is 25 essays that are ostensibly about such varied subjects as footnotes, Dante, and the Second Amendment, but that really all end up being about the same damn thing: language.

Did I say that 2,700,000 sounded about right? I’m starting to think it’s a tad high.

A test that Dr. Saltzman eventually would have passed.

Which leaves teaching, which I’m not convinced he was good at—not in any Dead Poet’s Society kind of way, anyway—and which I’m even less convinced he actually enjoyed. I don’t think he liked teaching anymore than an addict likes turning tricks. They both did what they had to do to in order to feed their addiction, only in Dr. Saltzman’s case the addiction wasn’t as illicit as the meth that ravaged so many of his neighbors. The addiction, for him, was writing.

There were rumors, especially around the time of his divorce, that he was trying to get out of Joplin, that he was trying to score a teaching gig elsewhere. I heard that he even landed an interview at a school in one of the Carolinas but that he failed to impress in person as much as he did on the page. A fellow professor confided to me in an off-the-record kind of way that Saltzman was rarely at his best when he was under pressure. All of that sarcasm eventually turned to bitterness after all. The most remarkable part of this story for me was that Saltzman would ever feel pressure. I always wondered if he would have actually taken the job, were it offered, what with his daughter still in the Midwest and all. What about Joy? What about Jeremy?

I know that I certainly would have taken it personally if he had left while I was still there, such were my feelings of proprietorship toward him. He played favorites in the classroom, and I was definitely one of them. There’s no denying that. I know this essay would be far more interesting if I were not, if I just kept to myself in the back row, soaking it all up in silence and never confessing how much he meant to me until it was too late, but that would be a lie. I was a favorite. He liked me, and he knew I liked him. I showed up every day, had done the readings, turned in my assignments on time, typed, with the tracks from the dot-matrix printer stripped away. I regularly demonstrated thought even if I never told him anything he didn’t already know.

Swear to god, I raised my hand and contributed maybe three times in four years. Once we were discussing E.L. Doctorow’s “A Writer in the Family,” and I wondered aloud if Doctorow might be punning on “writer/righter.” Saltzman said, Of course he is, and carried right on.

I thought I was going to have a fucking heart attack.

"Fillet."

In one of his forays into the sciences, Saltzman writes of his interest in books for beginning physicists, books that I was surprised to learn were on his shelf, with titles like Fear of Physics, A Beginner’s Book of Since the Beginnings, and The Universe Shut Up in a Nutshell. Amateur books. Books for rookies. About these books, he writes, “When obsession gets the better of me, I’ll open one to see how long I can sustain some semblance of coherence before I blear. I’m seldom more than ten minutes out of port before the fog sets in.”

I read this passage and thought, You son of a bitch. This is what your students felt. This confusion. This impenetrability. This, well, you said it yourself, this fog. This is what your students felt when you forced them to read John Hawkes, Toni Morrison, or Marilynne Robinson. Yes, “forced.” You made choices. You knew what it was like to be them. You were not unaware.

*****

But one guy—a football player, not to be all stereotypical about it—would sit in the middle of the desks with his head cracked back and his mouth agape and he would openly snore throughout the class. “It’s getting really hard to look at this everyday,” Saltzman once snapped loudly enough that the guy blinked awake for a moment before drifting back to sleep. Another guy, in a poetry writing class, wrote an ode to a truck that he found at the junkyard. The poem included the line, “If she turns over, I’ll be in love.” Saltzman's job was to provide an earnest critique of the poem. He approached it with the same care that he approached a poem by William Carlos Williams or Dianne Ackerman.

His final exam for his writing classes asked each member of the class to bring to the last meeting a passage they liked from a book. Any book, any passage. That was it. Just bring a passage. This was around Christmas, so I brought in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Christ Climbed Down.” Saltzman hated the Beats, sided with Truman Capote’s typing-not-writing criticism, but that wasn’t the point. The point was read. Share.

Inevitably, three people would bring in something from Parade magazine and one wouldn’t bring in anything at all.

The first paragraph of my midterm about John Updike begins: “John Updike is not a writer. This may be a shock to some of you who are familiar with some of his 20+ books, but I am going to have to deny him that title. He uses letters only to transcend words and builds passages and sentences[,] putting them on paper as a painter would but swipe a single stroke from his brush on the canvas.”

It only gets worse from there. Much worse. And I was one of the good ones.

Is it any wonder that he was bitter? Is it any wonder that he couldn’t constrain a desire to be elsewhere, to do better?

People believed him to be so cantankerous, so curmudgeonly that he became known as “Dr. Saltzman, That Teacher at Southern Who Hates Everything.”

It wasn’t a nickname he deserved, but few would argue that it wasn’t earned.